Blaise Compaoré
Blaise Compaoré ruled Burkina Faso for twenty-seven years, from the afternoon of 15 October 1987, when soldiers from his unit shot Thomas Sankara and twelve others at the council of the entente and he announced the rectification of the revolution, to 31 October 2014, when the crowds burned the parliament that was about to lift his term limit and he fled to Cote d'Ivoire in a French helicopter. He was Sankara's comrade in the coup of 1983, his closest friend, and the man the country blamed, and a court in Ouagadougou sentenced him in absentia to life imprisonment for the murder in 2022. He was born in 1951 near Ouagadougou, trained as a paratrooper in Morocco and France, and commanded the commando training centre at Po, whose men he marched on the capital in August 1983 to free Sankara from arrest and make him president. The four years of Sankara's revolution he served as minister of state, and the quarrel over its pace, over Sankara's purity and Compaoré's contacts with Houphouet-Boigny and the French, ended at the entente. He dismantled the revolution, restored the chiefs and the parties, and made himself president by election in 1991 with a quarter of the electorate voting, and again in 1998, 2005 and 2010. The regime was a family and a network. There was his brother Francois, whose driver was found burned in a car in 1998 with the journalist Norbert Zongo, who had been investigating it, which produced the first mass protests of the reign. There were the arms and diamonds he moved for Charles Taylor's Liberia and the Sierra Leone rebels, for which the UN named him. And there were the mediations he then conducted in Cote d'Ivoire, Togo, Guinea and Mali that made him useful to Paris and Washington. The constitution he had amended in 2000 limited him to two more terms, and in October 2014 his party moved to amend it again. The Balai Citoyen movement and a million people in the streets ended it in two days. Ivorian citizenship was arranged for him in 2016. He was tried in absentia with the officers who fired, and returned to Ouagadougou for a day in July 2022 to see the junta leader and lay a wreath, and went back to Abidjan.
- Lived: 1951 CE – ?
- Nationality: Burkinabe
- Roles: president, soldier, politician
